


Earning the Light

by rivkat



Category: Under The Dome (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:32:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivkat/pseuds/rivkat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible. -- Albert Einstein</p>
            </blockquote>





	Earning the Light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lunch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunch/gifts).



> Thanks to destina for excellent and quick beta in a fandom not her own.

“… Wow,” Barbie said, taking in her altered appearance. He blinked a couple of times. “That’s …”

Julia wanted to smack him, because there was understandable dismay and then there was rubbing it in. “Hey, I’m going to miss your pretty face too.”

“It’s not your _face_ anyone will be looking at,” he said, but his hand went up to touch the bandage on the bridge of his nose. Anyone looking would think he’d been on the losing end of a bar fight. Anyone human, that was; a facial-recognition program simply wouldn’t be able to match him to Dale Barbara’s database entry, which was the point. (She hadn’t asked how he’d known all this; there was no relevant answer.)

Since a woman with a broken nose presented very differently than a buff man with a broken nose, Julia had needed sterner measures. Her hair was now straightened, black-and-white color-striped horizontally, and with new bangs that fell over one eye, making her look like the world’s most confused punk. But it should serve the same distracting purposes, both for people and for computers. And that was important, especially since they were sticking together despite the massive federal hunt on for the King and Queen of Chester’s Mills, as the media were calling them.

Julia still blamed Joe for that title, a bit.

The biggest downside was that Julia was now going to stand out a lot, even if no one would immediately connect her to Julia Shumway, federal fugitive and accused murderer/traitor/something to be named later. There would be no carjacking or gas store robberies to pick up ready cash. But they’d already known that they couldn’t Bonnie and Clyde their way across the country, and being memorable but anonymous was better than being caught by the all-seeing surveillance state.

“We’re all packed,” Barbie said, motioning to their bags neatly lined up on the motel bed. “Next stop, California.”

Julia thought they might well be deluding themselves that there’d be any real help from the Berkeley scientist whose crackpot claims to understand the Dome were barely distinguishable from the thousands of other theories they’d scanned since they’d been out. But one of the last snatches of radio traffic they’d gotten before the Dome had come down had said her name, and so it was to Hannah Cho they were headed.

It wasn’t as if they had anywhere else to go, unless whoever sent the Dome decided to intervene further with a convenient spaceship pickup out of _Escape to Witch Mountain_. God, she wanted to dump the egg in a trashcan and hide until the whole mess went away.

Julia felt a throb of anxiety, but not in her body; it was almost as if the egg in her purse was poking her, mentally. Even though she knew she couldn’t afford the habit, she opened the purse to check: yep, still there, still mutely glowing, smoother than a new-shaven leg.

“Everything okay?”

Julia didn’t figure that telling him she was starting to imagine the egg tormenting her would help either of them, so she smiled tightly and nodded. There was no trashcan that could get her out of this, and she couldn’t really have abandoned her charge, not with the warning they’d gotten. Wishing it away was idle fantasy, like imagining that she’d never gotten herself fired from the only job she’d ever really loved.

The bus depot was only a few blocks away (which probably did a lot to explain the way the mattress had smelled), so they started walking.

****

Julia had become a reporter because she wanted to tell people’s stories. She couldn’t turn that off. On the next bus, she found herself listening to the life story of a woman who was moving to Chicago on the promise of an internship at a museum and a room in the apartment of a woman she only knew from a shared interest in shredding _Grey’s Anatomy_ at a fan website.

“I don’t mean to pry,” Julia couldn’t help herself saying, “but are you sure she’s a … she?”

Diane shrugged. “We’ve skyped a bunch of times. Good enough for me. You know people used to pack up and head to greener pastures without any idea what was ahead, right? They called them pioneers.”

“Huh,” Julia said, because it wasn’t a bad point and would’ve made a decent hook for a feature: maybe find a great-grandmother of Diane’s who’d gone to the prairie in a covered wagon, or something. 

Just another article she’d never get to write. 

Even if they survived, and didn’t get thrown in a hole in Guantanamo, Julia wasn’t going to be the reporter with the inside scoop on the Dome. She was the story now. A person couldn’t be both.

She saw Barbie turn his head in her direction from his place five rows up, as if he’d sensed her sudden spike of pessimism. She smiled in his general direction and reached up before she remembered that she wasn’t supposed to push her hair back. “So,” she said, “what’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get there?”

****

She’d been a little nervous that the sex would be terrible out from under the Dome, or that she wouldn’t feel the same desperate spark, but the pressure of being on the run must’ve been a sufficient substitute. Either that or Barbie just did it for her. As soon as he’d closed the door on the world she was on him, pushing him up against the wall only long enough for him to pick her up and carry her to the bed, kissing as they went.

She knew that someone who’d been shot in the chest not long ago shouldn’t be healthy enough even for gentle, tender sex. She also knew that she shouldn’t be sleeping with the man who killed her husband, and that hadn’t stopped her either. What the Dome, or the egg, might have had to do with either her physical recovery or her lack of inhibition wasn’t something she could contemplate for too long without going (more) haywire.

They could barely untangle themselves long enough to strip off their shirts—pretty as that was to watch him do—and Julia squeezed his ass while he struggled with her bra. She arched her head into the bedcovers as his mouth moved down her body, gentle but insistent. Touching him was like getting a hit of Ecstasy, every time. His shoulders were sleek and firm under her fingers, his hands curving perfectly around her breasts; the brush of his thumbs on the undersides made her gasp and wriggle underneath him, so ready to get him inside her.

Her hair still had that new-dyed chemical odor, but he smelled the same as ever, musky and strong, like he’d invented sex for her alone. 

Afterwards, he traced lines down her back, mapping an invisible journey. “I didn’t think I got to have someone like you,” he said, and she could tell that this was the kind of thing that he couldn’t have said to her face. “I thought there was no coming back for me, so it didn’t matter how much lower I went.”

Julia had already told him about her own flight from her past. She’d rebuilt, yes, but until the Dome she’d never faced up to what she’d done. Never admitted that it was part of her.

No—not ‘until the Dome.’ Until Barbie. She’d never confessed to anyone who hadn’t already known about her failures. She’d thought Peter had been so far above her, and now she wondered if she’d helped create that distance herself with her guilt, if she hadn’t looked too hard at what he was doing because she was still wrapped up in her own failings.

“What you do next always matters,” she said. “You can’t erase history. But it’s still history.” Saying it, she was able to believe it.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” he said, so low she could barely hear him. “And whatever you think, I promise you: I’ve done worse than that. But I’m going to get you to California.”

She turned to face him, wrapping the sheets around herself. In the near-darkness, he was a looming shape, big and strong and keeping the other monsters at bay. “I trust you,” she said, and if there was another word lurking under there, they both pretended it wasn’t. “If you’re such a dangerous man, tell me I should be afraid of you.”

She could see the gleam of his eyes, focused on her. Julia realized that she was honestly angry. They didn’t have time for his angst, and the faster he recognized that, the safer they’d be.

Barbie sighed and leaned over to kiss her. After a minute, he pulled back. His mouth was swollen, spit-shiny. Her skin was going to be red all over from the scrape of his beard. “No,” he said. “ _you_ shouldn’t be afraid of me.”

****

Barbie drove with a kind of easy focus she envied, a calm competence she—yes, she loved it about him, okay. The car he’d stolen from a dealer’s lot after they’d gotten through New York handled pretty well, for a vehicle that was nearly as old as she was. It still smelled like cigarette smoke underneath the heavy cleaners the dealer had used, and the vinyl seats creaked at every movement, but it was still faster and less nerve-wracking than the bus, where dozens of new strangers might see them at every stop. By mutual agreement, she was the one who got out and paid for the gas each time they stopped, because ‘lady with crazy hair’ was a lot less likely to make attendants antsy than ‘burly broken-nosed guy.’ 

“Ever seen the Grand Canyon?” Barbie asked. They were approaching Chicago. Their route wouldn’t take them into the city, but Julia appreciated that Barbie was probably trying to distract her from thoughts of her past screw-ups, and of her few remaining family members, now under heavy scrutiny from the government and the media.

She took a moment to put the memories in order. “When I was a kid, on a family trip. I don’t remember much—mainly the food. I was kind of a brat about ice cream.”

Barbie’s smile was indulgent and not particularly surprised. “I always wanted to go. Never got the chance.” 

“Why not? Did you grow up too far away?” It was one of a thousand questions she’d thought she’d never ask, not because she wasn’t interested but because their relationship had been based on not asking. Not knowing. Now that she knew he’d killed her husband, maybe she shouldn’t have cared about anything else, but she did. Somehow, Peter’s death had become part of the Dome, even though she knew that wasn’t how it had happened. Unless Peter’s debt had been like the pink stars falling in lines—premonitions, aligning people to get them ready for what was to come. It was like the Dome had brought Barbie to her while exposing Peter as the real stranger, another person who’d used Barbie as a tool to commit violence, if only on himself.

Or maybe she was a horrible person making excuses for herself. She could see how someone else might think that Barbie was only another one of a long line of her terrible decisions. 

“I grew up all over the country, really,” Barbie said, startling her out of her reverie. “My dad was military. There were a lot of bases.”

“I’ll bet,” Julia said automatically, making it sound salacious, which earned her a quick grin. Yeah, she could give good ‘that’s what your mom said’ when the situation demanded. It was another big-city reporter’s skill that she’d allowed to decay in Chesters Mills. In another life, maybe she could’ve been doing the story on Dale Barbara, vet abandoned by his country and seduced into a life of continued violence—or an expose on an organized crime ring and its enforcers. Hard to tell what her angle would’ve been. She wouldn’t have had sympathy for Barbie in that alternate Domeless reality, where her arrogant self-confidence had never been broken by being caught.

Again, there was that not-pulse in her head, like what she imagined a sonar ping would feel like if she could’ve felt it. She smoothed her hand over her purse, but refused to open it. “So, no Grand Canyon for you,” she said, trying to get the itch out of her brain.

“We didn’t really take vacations. It wasn’t my dad’s style.” The flash of remembered anger in his eyes was one clue about why Barbie would never, ever have bowed to Jim Rennie, even if the Dome had kept them a thousand years.

“Are they still around, your parents?” She was allowed to ask, she reminded herself. This wasn’t a story, and Barbie knew that she’d stick around even if he didn’t answer.

He shook his head.

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks,” he said, instead of any of the standard macho bullshit she expected from the default male, and she liked him that much more. She wanted to reach out and touch the line of his beard, scratchy-soft. She wanted to be in bed with him, letting him mouth his way up her thighs. “What about you?” he asked.

“I haven’t spoken to my mom in ten years,” she admitted. “Since right after my father passed. I guess I figured she’d reach out, maybe when the scandal broke. But she never did.”

Barbie chewed on his lip. “Sorry.”

“Thanks,” she echoed, and smiled a little. “Brothers? Sisters? Ex-wives? Ex-husbands?”

That made him laugh. “I was there for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, so that’s a no, like the rest.” 

Julia hesitated. This wasn’t an interview, where she asked all the questions and he did all the important talking. “I don’t have siblings either. I feel so weird, asking you first date questions.”

Barbie reached out and fiddled with the air conditioning, even though there was nothing wrong with the temperature. “If it makes you feel any better, I feel weird answering them. I wasn’t much of a talker at the best of times.”

“I’m sorry, I’ll stop,” she said, because she could be misreading Barbie, like she’d misread Peter.

“No!” The car jerked down the road. “I can’t talk about a lot of my life. And I wish to hell I hadn’t come into yours. But I also—I want to give you what I can. I want—I want to be enough for you.”

“Barbie,” she said, and he took his eyes off the road again, long enough to see that she was deadly serious. “You already are.”

She wished she could prove it by chucking everything and running away with him. They could start over, go to Australia and learn to sail boats and whatever else people did when they were on the run as a couple who had nothing to care about but themselves.

Ping.

“Julia?”

She inhaled, exhaled, did it again. “Do you—I’m getting a weird feeling about the egg. And since the egg is entirely weird, I don’t know what that means, or even if I’m making it up. But it’s like—it wants something from me. And it’s making me want to throw it in a lake even more.”

Ping.

Barbie frowned. “Has it been changing, like the chrysalis did?”

She didn’t want to explain how she’d been refusing to look, so that she could pretend that she was still in control over her life, so she gave in. Inside, the egg was still the real-life CGI artifact, sparkly and smooth, neither warm nor cool to the touch.

But at least the pinging had stopped.

“Huh,” she said.

“What?” Barbie glanced over at her, then back at the road. “Are you getting anything more concrete?”

“I wish.” She frowned at the egg. “What if it is really some kind of metaphor, like the butterfly? There was a chrysalis, then the butterfly emerged. Do you remember about fifteen years ago, there was this fad for digital animals, Tamagotchi?”

“Pretty sure I was someplace they didn’t have Tamagotchi,” Barbie said.

“I wrote an article for the school paper. Point is, you had to take care of them, or they’d die. You had to feed them and groom them, virtually I mean, or they’d go belly-up like real goldfish.” She reached into the bag. As much as she feared the Dome, if this was some kind of—baby, God, what if it was an alien baby? 

If so, it wasn’t any more responsible for this mess than she was. Woman up, she told herself, and took it out.

It was motionless in her hand, sparkling more than a Twilight vampire but otherwise inert. 

She wasn’t ready to be a mother to a human infant, much less an _egg from another world_. It was something she’d fought about with Peter, who’d thought that the crash and burn of her career was a perfect opportunity to start their family. Julia had thought that was what made it the worst possible time. She didn’t want to have a child as a second choice.

None of that was relevant now.

“Maybe it’s trying to ask for attention. Hey,” she addressed the egg, even though that hadn’t worked with the mini Dome. “Is anyone in there?”

Silence. Apparently the visit from Alice Calvert’s ghost had been their version of the Annunciation. “If you have any ideas about how I’m supposed to protect you, now would be a good time. We’re trying to get to a scientist who might have some answers. But I’d rather hear them from the horse’s mouth. Egg’s mouth.”

Barbie snorted. 

Julia glared at him. “I’m taking suggestions, Barbie.”

“I suggest we stop to eat,” he said easily, changing into the exit lane. “You get kind of cranky when your blood sugar is low.”

“Also when I’m being chased by every government agency invented and a few they probably made up just for us.” But she subsided, returning to contemplating the egg. Hello? she thought at it, in case there really was some sort of signal coming from it. Are you in there? Blink once for yes, two for no. Its weight in her hand was slight; she kept expecting it to warm up from contact with her skin, but it stayed stubbornly neutral. Like the Dome, the egg seemed unaffected by any human action, even as it manipulated them for its own ends.

Barbie picked a roadside Mexican joint that looked downscale enough that they wouldn’t be completely out of place, even with her hair and his down-on-his-luck-boxer image. The food was packed with cheese and salt, which was exactly what she wanted, even if she couldn’t have a margarita. (A little internal voice—definitely not the egg’s—needled her that she was expecting, now; that would’ve been enough to get her to order the alcohol after all, if not for the need to remain on edge.)

Over the bar, a Spanish-language news show offered an update on the Dome and the now-standard picture of Julia that had been on the paper’s website next to her byline, along with the closely cropped picture of Barbie that made Julia wonder what exactly the rest of the photo would have revealed.

“How’s the cash doing?” Barbie asked when she slipped a few bills out of her purse to cover the check. 

Julia didn’t need to count to know the answer, and she spoke low enough that she wouldn’t be overheard. “We’ve got a few thousand left. At this rate, we’ll make it with a couple of hundred to spare.” Barbie had liberated the money from Big Jim’s stash right after the Dome had come down, when they’d heard him giving his side of the story to the feds. Big Jim had talked his usual good game, and Julia had known that no matter what the government would take the egg away from her, which seemed contrary to the ghost’s admittedly opaque instructions. Overall, running had seemed like a better choice than staying.

Barbie nodded and they returned to the road.

****

Given their history, it was almost shocking that they didn’t get into a fight until they were into Nevada. In the diner, they took a seat as near to the entrance to the kitchen as possible, like always, in case they had to make a quick exit. Unfortunately, they were also close to the bathroom, and that gave the post-game-celebrating guys sitting at the front a perfect excuse to come by and ogle Julia.

Back before the Dome, she would’ve called them on it, but here and now she looked at her food, letting her outrageous hair fall over her face, and ignored the fake-whispered comments about her hair and her tits, and how the tits made up for the hair.

Barbie’s mouth tightened, the same way it had around Junior. Barbie’s tight hold on himself made him stronger than the unreflexively violent thug Big Jim was telling everyone about. But Julia knew that control went a lot further when the insults were directed at himself than when they were aimed at her. 

“Doesn’t do me any harm,” she murmured. He blinked, even his eyelashes somehow conveying deep dismay, but he wasn’t going to get up and go over there, which was all she wanted. She reached across the table and covered his hand with hers. “Self-control is very sexy, you know.”

“Really,” he said—but that was when the dumbest of the drunk guys, who was ambling by on his way back from the bathroom, decided that he was tired of indirect provocation. He put his hand on Julia’s shoulder, slipping downward so that his fingers “accidentally” started to go down her blouse, before she jerked away.

Barbie rocketed out of his bench seat, but Julia was fast enough to kick the guy—missed his balls, more’s the pity—and shove him away from their booth. Then Barbie caught him, grabbed him by the back of the collar, and bounced him off of the grease-stained tile wall that separated their corner from the kitchen. They glanced at each other and mutually decided that going out past the rest of the group—now rising en masse from their table—was a poor tactical choice. Julia scrambled for the back exit, pausing only to throw a few twenties at the table to overpay for their still-unserved food. If nothing else, it might earn them enough goodwill to keep the staff from calling the cops.

The egg tugged at her as she pushed the swinging door open, like an invisible hand had grabbed her hair. She turned around and saw Barbie throwing the downed drunk guy at his approaching compatriots, knocking a few more over. She could see what was going to happen from the set of his shoulders: he hadn’t started the fight, but he was damn sure going to finish it. “Come on!” she yelled, and Barbie started to move in her direction.

Sadly, the guys were slightly smarter than they were pretty, and at least five of them had headed out to the parking lot to avoid the bottleneck in the back of the diner. They saw Barbie and Julia round the corner of the building and started yelling for their friends.

Julia fumbled for the keys, shoving them through the gaps in her fingers as her long-ago self-defense class had taught her. Especially with her gunshot wound not entirely healed, she could be most helpful by staying out of the way, so she let Barbie keep himself between her and the guys.

Barbie was vicious and quick, and these boys didn’t know how to fight. The first two came at him like they were showing off for each other instead of trying to beat him. The one who had the bright idea of going for Julia instead backed off when Julia’s keys caught him across the cheek, and then Barbie disabled him with a punch to the back of the head. Then the rest arrived, and Barbie didn’t go down under a pile only because they were drunk enough to be getting in each other’s way.

Julia jumped into the car and turned on the headlights, which made everybody but Barbie freeze for a second. He was still surrounded, and he used the opportunity to clear himself a path to the car.

She gunned the engine as he landed heavily in the passenger seat. She didn’t see any cops as they pulled back onto the road.

Every blow Barbie landed had seemed to make him flinch, though no one would have seen it but Julia. She wondered what it was like to be so good at something you hated so much. The Dome had both given Barbie a chance to be free of violence and snatched that chance away, one of its many cruelties. Julia wanted to believe that, when they’d finished protecting the egg (whatever that meant), Barbie could have the peaceful life he so clearly craved. But journalism bred cynics; she wasn’t getting her hopes up.

Barbie was panting shallowly beside her. “Are you okay?” she asked, not sure what she’d do if he wasn’t.

“Fine,” he said. There was a scrape high on his cheek, complementing the rest of his broken-nose disguise. “Did you know it’s much harder to incapacitate a man in hand-to-hand than it is to kill him?”

“So basically, you’re Batman.”

That made him grin, and then wince; she’d intended the first result, at least. “I could’ve killed them.” It wasn’t bragging. She nodded. “But I heard a holy man say, a long time ago: everyone who saves a life, it’s as if they saved the whole world. I don’t know what the hell is happening, Julia. I only know I don’t want to be destroying any more worlds.”

She wanted to pull over and hold him. She could imagine how it would be, leaning in to him on the side of the road and feeling his big hands on her, not even sexual right then. Letting the cars whoosh by, taking a moment of stillness for themselves, his nose brushing her forehead, her arms wrapped around his waist.

Tonight, she promised herself. Tonight, they’d hang on to each other and let their missing pieces not matter so much.

She drove westward, where their hope of understanding was.

****

The egg didn’t want to be left alone. It knocked inside her head when she left it even for a little while, and she was getting the feeling that it didn’t even like Barbie to be in a different room, which made bathroom breaks at restaurants even more uncomfortable than the baseline paranoia she was already feeling. It was like living with the worst possible version of imprinting, without even getting cute baby ducks. 

When she told Barbie about it, he looked like she had when the business editor had tried to explain synthetic collateralized debt obligations to her: each word had meaning, it was the combination that failed to gel. “It’s got an alarm, which it buzzes when I get too far away, or when you get too far away, or sometimes even when I _think_ about leaving it.”

“An alarm,” Barbie repeated. “Does it get louder if you let it buzz?”

Julia hadn’t thought to test that. 

Five minutes later, she dashed back into the motel room and grabbed up her purse, rooting for the egg. Unlike a human baby, it shut up immediately, and Julia sighed in relief.

Barbie, watching, shook his head. “I didn’t hear anything.”

“It’s not exactly hearing,” she said. “It’s like—hearing purple, or tasting loud.”

Barbie sighed and ran his hands through his hair. “This keeps getting stranger. And it started with a cow cut in half!”

They both burst out laughing. She put the egg down as she sank to the mattress, laughing because it was funny and terrible and who the hell were they to be chosen as egg-protectors and possibly world-savers? The Dome had spectacularly bad judgment, Julia thought, and then realized that in that way—maybe only in that way—it was just like them.

Barbie stopped laughing. He sat down next to her, putting his arm around her as she shook. His hands were so solid; nothing they held, she thought, could be harmed. He kissed her, and the time for worrying was over. 

Even if the Dome had done this, Julia thought afterwards, even if it had ignited this spark that burned hotter in her each time she touched him, that was all right. She’d been living a lie back in Chesters Mills, and she still felt like the same person. Only now she was in a mind-boggling situation and in—lust with a hot guy who would die to protect her. So what if some alien or magical entity was playing matchmaker; it couldn’t do a worse job than her Aunt Celia and that creepy stalker dude from college. 

“I can feel you thinking too hard,” Barbie grumbled.

Julia sighed and shifted so that she was spooning him. “How hard should I think?” she asked, moving her hand down his belly until he gasped.

“That’s—oh God—good,” he said. And then she didn’t have to worry at all for a while.

****

There were drones flying around the Berkeley campus.

“I doubt that has anything to do with us,” she said when Barbie pointed them out.

Nonetheless, they tried to stick to tree-lined walkways. 

“At least you look like you could be a grad student,” Barbie grumbled as they searched for the right building. “I look like I should be arrested for even trying to get on campus.”

It was true that Barbie was attracting more double-takes than Julia, the first time that had happened since she’d skunk-striped her hair. But she wouldn’t have been willing to separate even if the egg would have tolerated it. “We said we’d do this together,” she reminded him when she caught him looking around as if he was planning to escape back to the car.

“I think I said I’d get you to her.” 

“Well, I’m not to her yet, am I?” She stopped and consulted her visitor’s center map for the hundredth time. “I think they use the layout as an extra screening mechanism. If you’re not smart enough to navigate this maze, maybe you don’t belong here.”

Only six wrong turns later, they reached the physics annex. In the post-9/11 world, the building had badge entry, but this was also America and Julia was a pretty white woman with a nice smile, so the next person who walked out didn’t hesitate to hold the door for them.

Julia knocked to make sure Dr. Cho hadn’t unexpectedly cancelled class and holed up in her office instead. Then they checked the corridor for cameras. Seeing none, Barbie picked the lock on Dr. Cho’s office. 

Inside was an explosion of paper that made the average journalism bullpen look like a clean room. There were a couple of chairs, identifiable by the legs and backs that were keeping stacks of papers from merging with the ones on the floor and the ones on the bookshelves covering the walls. There was also a desk-shaped object with a computer monitor and some sort of executive toy that looked like it had about a thousand different moving parts.

Barbie took it in with appalled dismay. “We can’t hide in here waiting for her! There’s no _room_!”

It was true; if the good doctor had arrived right then, she would have opened the door directly into Julia’s hip.

Well, damn. Hollywood had lied to her about the size of college professors’ offices. Julia put her hand on Barbie's bicep to ground herself, contemplating the options. “We should sit on the floor outside and wait.” 

“Won’t people think that’s strange?” 

“It’s Berkeley,” Julia said. “To get noticed here, we’d have to fuck in a position they’d never seen before.” The profanity was deliberate, because Barbie was already way too revved up. She needed a distraction for him, and unfortunately actual public sex probably would be going too far.

Barbie choked. And blushed, which was adorable.

****

Despite his initial nerves, Barbie was nearly asleep on her shoulder by the time Dr. Cho finally arrived, a good forty-five minutes after her class ended. He came fully alert when the stairwell door opened, and they both stood before she reached her door.

“Dr. Cho?” Julia began, even though she recognized the woman from her picture on the Berkeley website. She was short, slender, and had her hair back in a neat ponytail. A blue chenille sweater and jeans completed the picture of a professional woman in a profession that didn’t require much in the way of dressing up.

Dr. Cho gave her a polite but dismissive smile. “I’m sorry, I only talk to potential Ph.D. students in the first week of the semester.”

“That’s not why we’re here,” Julia said. “We wanted to talk about your theory about the Dome.”

That made Dr. Cho’s whole body tighten up. “I’m no longer giving interviews on the subject.”

“That’s all right,” Julia said, and pushed her hair off of her face. “I’m Julia Shumway, and this is Dale Barbara. We’re not who they say we are on TV. We’re here because we think you might be able to help us.”

The professor froze, and Julia could feel Barbie’s intense discomfort; he was too used to making people afraid. 

But she was used to getting people comfortable enough to talk. This was the same thing, played for higher stakes. 

“I promise, all we’re asking is that you hear us out,” she said, widening her hands. “Please, can we sit down and talk?”

Once a person had done another person a favor in response to a request, they were likely to do more when asked again. It wasn’t intuitive, but it was true, and Julia had always been able to use that with her subjects.

Dr. Cho was used to being asked questions while she sat behind a desk. She’d feel in control, respected. 

“You have to answer some questions for me,” the professor said, and Julia knew they were safe.

Dr. Cho cleared spaces for them to sit with the efficiency of someone who had to do it a lot. To show goodwill, she and Barbie gave first-hand accounts of how the Dome had appeared to them. Dr. Cho nodded along, engrossed.

When they’d finished describing the Dome, before Julia could even prompt her, Dr. Cho said, “My theory is that it’s a transdimensional incursion. The mini dome that’s been mentioned could be a—a reflection, if you like, of the larger Dome.”

Julia and Barbie looked at each other. Neither of them had any idea what that could mean.

“And the egg?” Julia asked.

“What egg?” Dr. Cho said blankly.

“Nobody’s mentioned the egg?” Julia should have been following the reporting more carefully.

Dr. Cho shook her head. 

Julia blew out a breath. “We’re really trusting you here. We are trying to do the right thing. Can you believe that?”

“I’ll believe anything that will get me to this egg of yours,” Dr. Cho said, which was not the ideal answer, except that Julia had the sense that it was honest. She was a scientist, with a scientist’s evident disdain for military secrecy.

“Here,” Julia said, opening her purse. “We don’t know what it is. The entity, or whatever, that sent the Dome said we had to protect it. We don’t know from what. Basically we are in the dark here. Can you help?”

Dr. Cho came around her desk and leaned over. “My god,” she said to herself. “Can I touch it?”

“The Dome shocked most people. I wouldn’t take the chance, not first thing,” Julia told her apologetically. “Is there any way you can examine it without touching?”

Dr. Cho didn’t lift her eyes from the egg. “Let’s go to my lab.”

****

“I should be able to identify radiation emanating from the egg across a wide spectrum.”

“Could that hurt the egg?” Being the cause of the harm she was supposed to protect the egg from would be a really dumb way to go down in history, in Julia’s opinion.

Dr. Cho gave her an are-you-serious look. She spoke slowly and distinctly, as if to a child who was having a tantrum. “The measurements I plan to gather wouldn’t hurt any earthly organism, and I don’t have any reason to believe that your egg would react differently. But that it needs protection implies that there is something out there capable of causing it harm. The only way I know how to figure out what that might be is to run tests. You came to me for help. You have to decide if you’re going to let me help you.”

Julia flushed with embarrassment, but she still believed that it had been a legitimate question.

Egg, she thought, if you have any objections, you’d better state them now. I don’t have a better idea.

The egg, of course, was quiescent, as if it was merely happy to be in Julia and Barbie’s presence. “All right,” Julia said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Dr. Cho detected nothing. She changed her settings, and detected nothing. She had Julia put the egg in different places, and detected nothing. She used mirrors and lasers and a refrigerated container, and detected nothing. Barbie went to grab them some snacks from the nearby student café, and even that didn’t make a detectable difference, though maybe that was because Julia knew he was coming right back.

Which was when she realized that she hadn’t told Dr. Cho that one particular piece of information about the egg, if it even was information.

“Um,” she said, as Dr. Cho cursed under her breath and wielded the smallest screwdriver Julia had ever seen, tweaking one of her machines.

“Yes?” 

“This might all be in my head,” Julia said. “I can’t be sure. But it feels like, maybe, there’s some kind of link between me and the egg. When I leave it, or when I think about leaving it, I feel a kind of … pain.”

“And you didn’t mention this before?” Dr. Cho’s voice was loud and she looked Julia in the eyes for the first time since she’d revealed the egg.

“You’re a physicist, not a psychiatrist! I don’t even know if it’s real.”

Dr. Cho clicked her tongue against her teeth. “Some hypothesize that certain dimensional shortcuts might explain what have been popularly reported as psychic phenomena. I never gave it much credence, but plainly there is more to know.”

Within minutes of Barbie’s return with blessed coffee, there was a new setup, and Dr. Cho sent Julia out of the room to test the connection.

Immediately the egg began its pulsing, like it was pushing against a bruise inside her head.

“I’ve detected a signal!” Dr. Cho enthused as soon as Julia reentered. “It’s in the terahertz range.”

“Like a radio signal? How could I hear a radio signal?” 

Dr. Cho’s entire body seemed to vibrate with interest. “If it is transdimensional, then what we’re picking up as electromagnetic radiation could be something more. There are theories that suggest that human consciousness itself has a frequency. If it’s attuned to you, then ….”

“Then you don’t know anything more than we do,” Barbie said wearily.

“Science doesn’t happen in one afternoon!” she snapped. “This is a major breakthrough. You weren’t even sure the connection was _real_ until now.”

“Dr. Cho,” Julia said, hoping to placate her, “we appreciate what you’re doing, believe me. We’re worried that we have a deadline, and we still don’t even know how to protect the egg.”

Dr. Cho returned to her monitor, which was displaying a dizzying array of graphs and numbers. “At this point,” she said, her voice already distant as she began to review the data, “you might as well call me Hannah.”

Now that she knew what to look for, she found that the egg was emitting this terahertz signal even when Julia was in the room. When Julia touched it, the emissions spiked, and also when Barbie touched it, even though Barbie couldn’t detect anything. 

“Also,” she told them after studying the results, “the baseline is slowly increasing.”

“Increasing until what? Another opening, like the chrysalis and the Dome?”

“What’s going to come out this time?” Barbie added.

Hannah tugged nervously at her hair. “I can’t tell you that. All I can do is look for patterns.”

At her hip, her cellphone buzzed; she jumped. Julia deeply hoped that there wasn’t some partner abandoned at home.

Hannah answered. “Okay,” she said after a moment. “I guess you’d better send them over.”

She hung up. “That was the departmental assistant. She says those men from the Army are here again.”

Barbie looked like he wanted to protest, but he knew better: trying to divert them would’ve been suspicious, and the military was already freaked out enough about an impenetrable barrier on American soil.

“Hide in the equipment closet,” Hannah ordered them, trying futilely to put her hair back into its neat ponytail. 

“But what about all this stuff you have out to analyze the egg?” Barbie asked.

Hannah waved a hand. “They’re military. How will they know it’s any different from what I use to make my coffee?”

Her point, while not entirely convincing, was good enough given that they didn’t have an alternative. Julia retrieved the egg and they jammed into the back of the equipment closet. Julia scrunched down next to a cardboard box that smelled like it had come directly from a chicken processing plant, while Barbie stayed in front of her, crouched beside a studded metal sphere that could’ve been used as a prop in a 1980s science fiction show. The lights were out and they didn’t dare move for fear of crashing into something and betraying their presence. The equipment closet sounded like a great place to hide until you realized that half the stuff inside had significant glass components, Julia thought sourly. 

At least the acoustics were good. Not five minutes after they’d scurried into place, the military men arrived. From what Julia heard, they wanted Hannah to go over her theories again. She caught only fragments at first, as she adjusted to the sound of their voices. “Transdimensional incursion—completely vulnerable—years away from being able to detect it before the fact.”

Apparently each side found the other frustrating. Hannah snapped, probably aided by the stress of having two federal fugitives in her closet. “Why would transdimensional entities care about human politics? It would be like you or I having a moral opinion about triangles!”

Her interlocutor sounded like he was three millimeters away from yelling. “The _Dome_ says that they have opinions about us. And that they aren’t here to offer a helping hand.”

“Well, yes,” Hannah said awkwardly, and a lot less loudly. “I realize that’s a problem for my theory. And aliens, being alien, could have moral opinions about triangles, yes. But I still don’t have the technology you’re looking for, and I can’t build it overnight like some kind of James Bond villain.”

“If this is about money—”

“Oh, I’ll take your money, have no doubt about that. But I won’t tell you I can build you a Dome-penetrating device in the next month. Maybe in the next year. If I’m left _alone_.”

There was a long pause, and then a rough laugh. “You know, doctor, you’re kind of a pain, but at least you’re honest. Our people will be in touch about the funding.”

Hannah waited five minutes before opening the door. Julia and Barbie blinked at the sudden incursion of light. “If you get me executed for treason I’m never going to forgive you. Also, if I win the Nobel, I am not giving you any credit, for obvious reasons.”

Julia didn’t snark back, because she could see that Hannah’s hand was still shaking on the doorknob.

When they came back out, they saw that during her conversation with the military men, she’d been moving machines around. “I realized, while I was explaining the basics to the people chasing you, that there _is_ something I can build right now. This thing, the Dome and the egg, it may look incoherent from the outside. But there’s always an internal logic.”

“Speaking of incoherent,” Julia said. “I think you skipped a couple of steps there.”

Hannah sighed. “Look, from what you’ve said, the communications to date have been vague and almost metaphoric, as if it’s being filtered through what you already know, right?”

“… Right,” Julia agreed, or hoped she did.

“I won’t confuse you with explanations, but I might be able to fine-tune the transmissions. Take out some of the static, as it were.”

“Well, do it!” she said immediately. Barbie was behind her, his arms folded over his chest, backing her up. It was an amazingly reassuring feeling, given how screwed they were in actuality.

Hannah was turning her ponytail into a bun now, using it as storage space for what looked like a pen, a pencil, and a metal spike whose uses Julia wasn’t even going to speculate about. “You’re going to have to give me a lot of baseline data for the egg. More trials, more distance, more time away.” 

Essentially, Julia thought, I’m going to have to keep telling my unwanted baby that I’m abandoning it. Extradimensional entity or not, she couldn’t deny that what she was feeling was distress, _its_ distress—or something that translated as distress, and if she believed that kittens could feel pain, didn’t she have to believe that alien whatevers could too?

But there was no choice. And in the end, she wasn’t the one who’d put the egg in this position. She was trying to deal with the consequences, and also possibly to protect humanity.

“Yes,” she said. “Tell us what to do.”

****

After a while, she had to go farther to get the ping, even though the frequency readings were still doing what they were supposed to. “It’s learning,” she told Hannah. 

Hannah frowned, disagreeing. “We don’t know that. We only know it’s changing.”

Julia didn’t like the sound of that. Every time the Dome had changed had brought them more danger.

“Do you need to stop?” Barbie asked.

She shook her head, but when he came to stand by her, she leaned up against his shoulder until he took her into a full hug. “Whatever you’re doing, _keep doing it_!” Hannah snapped. “The signal has changed, and doubled again.”

There was a lot of clanking as she adjusted and improvised, muttering to herself in jargon that might as well have been Ancient Hebrew as far as Julia was concerned. Julia closed her eyes and let Barbie be the one solid thing in her universe.

“How am I supposed to do this?” Julia whispered into his shoulder. “I’m just a disgraced reporter who should be mourning for her husband.”

Barbie’s arms tightened around her. “That’s not everything you are. The Dome chose you for a reason. You’re strong enough to find the answers. And—I’m going to stay with you while you do it. You told me yourself, the past can’t control us.”

Barbie had come through much more than professional death to get where they were. He’d survived when so many others had perished. And here he was, following her lead. She needed to be strong enough to deserve that trust. 

Julia brushed her lips against his neck, right where his beard started. “Thank you,” she said. No one else might ever understand. If outsiders found out about what had happened to Peter, she’d be a black widow and he’d be even more of a brute. But she and Barbie knew there was so much more to both of them. Even if she was everything bad that could be said about her, she was also going to do everything she could to fight the darkness and earn the light, the way Alice’s image had instructed. 

We’ll do our part, she thought. We just need a little help.

“Hello,” a computerized voice said, crackling out of Hannah’s jerry-rigged speakers. “Let’s go save the world.”


End file.
